So as some of you might know, I’m a member of a marxist party, maybe one of the biggest of Western Europe currently.
The party is not ML. It takes part in electoral politics, though its main focus is building class consciousness at the work places and in the local communities. Getting into parliament is beneficial because 1) money and 2) raising awareness.
The party gets criticized by groups on the margin. They sometimes specifically criticize the MLs in our party for joining, because we are not part of what Lenin described as a Vanguard Party. I guess they are not entirely wrong, I’m not going to call my party ML even though there is (increasing) room for ML sentiment.
My problem is, I don’t really know what to do with these critics. Leaving the current party, with tens of thousands of active members and actual political influence, for a ‘true ML party’ with several dozen people who struggle to organize a book club, does not sound like the way to go. Stop calling myself a ML? That would seem weird as well.
How do you guys look at this?
DKP is really the only communist party in Germany worth mentioning. And they are fairly based on issues relating to anti-imperialism. Their official publication UZ (Unsere Zeit) seems generally quite solid on most geopolitical topics and i haven’t seen much of an anti-AES line either there or from Junge Welt which is another somewhat sizeable publication with close ties to the DKP. Now whether they can be called reformist or not that is a matter of debate and definition, some so-called “anti-revisionists” would insist that the CPC itself is revisionist, so we need to be a little critical whenever we see that term thrown around. I find what is more important than having a 100% (by whichever standard you want to measure it) ML line, is that they take more or less the correct and principled position on the issues that really matter in practice.
And also they’re not Trotskyists, so that’s good.
Just to clear up any confusion, the revisionism part was aimed at the MLPD, not the DKP. But thanks for the solid overview!
MLPD are super sus and honestly probably some sort of op by the feds.